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Max Payne: The Noir Story Thus Far

Max Payne 3, the latest and greatest in the neo-noir shoot-em-up series, is on the way, featuring an older, down-and-out, bald Max in Brazil working a security detail. How did this former NYPD detective end up older, down-and-out, and bald? I'm gonna kick a little knowledge for you right here. It's a long and sordid tale with more twists and turns than Lombard Street, so you might want to grab a cold drink before we get started. Ready? Let's go:

Our tale begins in the winter of 2001, as New York City is experiencing the worst blizzard in recorded memory. Max Payne, title character/bad ass/guy-in-the-black-suit, reminisces about his life three years prior, when he returned home from work at the NYPD to find his wife and infant daughter dead at the hands of junkies tweaking on a new drug called Valkyr -- think of it as Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries in pill form.

Anyway, Max is pretty broken up about this, and spends the majority of the next two games -- and at least one line of the trailer for the Mark Wahlberg film -- being tortured by it. At the outset of the first game, Max is working deep undercover for the DEA, and has penetrated the powerful Punchinello crime family in New York. However, as he goes to meet his colleague and best friend in a subway station, he stumbles upon Punchinello underboss Jack Lupino trying to rob a bank by tunneling into its vault from the subway station. All hell breaks loose, Max's friend gets killed, Max gets framed for it, and his cover is blown with the mafia. Pretty much everybody in the Tri-State area wants to kill him at this point, people.

I've had a bad day!

On a desperate quest to avenge his friend and clear his name, Max begins by cornering one of Lupino's lieutenants. Max gets him to spill the beans on the location of Lupino's hideout and discovers that the Punchinellos are also engaged in a major turf war with the Russian mob. Hideout map in hand, Max finds and kills Lupino, but is knocked out by super-hot female assassin Mona Sax (yeah, baby, yeah!), after which the mob drags him away to be tortured.

Keeping up? Good, let's keep moving, because things are about to get a whole lot more complicated. Max escapes from his jabroni torturers and allies with the Russians, agreeing to assassinate a thorn in their side in exchange for an arsenal of powerful weapons. With these, he mounts a full-on assault of the Punchinello's headquarters, makes full use of the game's Bullet-Time mechanic, confronts the boss of the entire family, and demands revenge... only to witness the boss himself shot in the head by agents of the Aesir Corporation, run by sadistic female jerkwad Nicole Horne.

Horne captures Max and injects him with what she thinks is a lethal dose of Valkyr, but because she forgot to account for the fact that this is Max frickin' Payne we're talking about here, he doesn't die. He just hallucinates about his wife's murder – during which she outright tells him that he is just a character in a video game. Trippy.

Back on his feet, Max follows a lead to an old steel foundry that's really a cover for a military research complex. Here, he discovers that Valkyr was the result of an attempt to create a super-soldier serum, and that Max's wife had discovered the project's nature and was killed by Horne's crazed Valkyr test subjects to prevent her from releasing the evidence. Yeah, shit just got personal.